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I’m reading archaeologist Gregory J. Wightman’s The Origins of Religion in the Paleolithic, and thinking hard about how we humans evolved over the past several million years with a “God-shaped hole” in our psyches. I haven’t found the answer yet, but Philosopher Alain de Botton suggested in a recent interview that it is culture that can serve to fill that genuine sense of void that many of us sometimes feel in our modern lives.

You only have to look at the architecture of libraries and theaters and universities that were built in the age of declining religion to understand that our ancestors sought to fill the gap by creating temples of art, temples of culture, temples of learning, where we would congregate as we had previously done in the temples of religion.

Culture and the knowledge that it’s built on — but, most importantly, the processes and methods that increase, transmit, and store that knowledge — represent all that is good and holy about our species. While museums that house our art and science are certainly worthy of reverence, for sheer density of knowledge it’s hard to find a better temple of culture than a library.

The Guardian recently published a gorgous photo essay (though I’m unable to re-share their photos) of the most beautiful libraries in America. I’m proud to say that two of these libraries are right here in Seattle. In fact, for the first three months after I started up my previous company’s new Engineering hub, my team and I met each Friday at the Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus.

I haven’t yet visited the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington, but its Gothic Revival architecture certainly evokes European cathedrals, proving Alain de Botton’s point about 19th-century architects of secular institutions.

Since appending “5 more museums to visit before I die” to my list of favorite museums back in 2009, I’ve visited several of them (the Met in New York, the Prado) and it may be time for a new list that includes museums I hadn’t anticipated loving so much (MOMA, Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid).

And the Guardian has provided a convenient list of new places for pilgrimage I hope to visit in my lifetime.

Contrary to the perception of many westerners, sumo is a game of speed and strategy, in which wrestlers assess their opponent’s weaknesses — psychological as much as physical — and attempt to outmaneuver quickly in order to get the upper hand. All sumo wrestlers are incredibly strong, but many also bulk up in order to give themselves an advantage in the ring. Not so with Chiyonofuji (千代の富士), who began his career in the early 1970s and retired in 1991 — spanning all the years I spent in Japan as a child. Some of the first foreign wrestlers came to prominence during that same time, Takamiyama (from Hawaii) and Konishiki (a Hawaiian born Samoan), but I always identified more with the little guy in the black mawashi.

The month before my family left for the States, I watched my last sumo tournament in Japan, during which Konishiki handily defeated Chiyonofuji by shoving him out of the ring with an “oshidashi.”

And it was hard not to root for the American-born Konishiki when he beat the already legendary Yokozuna during their first match in 1984.

But it was all the smart moves he had made during the previous 15 years that left such an impression on me, often employing his much-feared “uwatenage” (literally “upper hand throw”).

As an American kid attending a local Japanese school, I was different from my Japanese classmates in both obvious and less-obvious ways. Children all over the world can be incredibly cruel to anybody who’s different, and I was the frequent victim of schoolyard bullies. Chiyonofuji proved that being bigger and stronger did not always result in victory — outthinking your adversary is far more important.

Back in 2012, Stephen Hawking visited Seattle and I had the privilege of attending a lecture he gave titled “Brane New World.” Now, I know from a statistical standpoint that I’m above average in intelligence, and I’ve read widely and deeply in physics and cosmology — I read Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory when I was 15. And yet, I struggled to follow pretty much anything Hawking talked about. On my own in the darkened auditorium, being a statistical “genius”[1] did not alone enable me to understand the concepts of M-theory in his lecture.

This week, PBS launched a new, six-part series titled “Genius with Stephen Hawking.” Hawking narrates, and the show follows a trio it describes as “ordinary people”[2] through a sequence of exercises and experiments in which they uncover key concepts in physics and cosmology.

At the beginning of the first show, Hawking addresses the team as “my budding geniuses.” Over the course of the show, they successfully conclude that backwards time travel is impossible due to the fundamental laws of physics, while the rather counterintuitive forwards “time travel” (beyond our prosaic movement through the fourth dimension as we live our lives) is a very real possibility thanks to the effects of gravity on space-time. Because time itself travels more slowly the closer one is to a major gravitational source, traveling relative to such a source — toward or away — causes a desynchronization of how the traveler experiences time from the “absolute” time at the traveler’s point of origin. For example, orbiting the supermassive black hole likely at the center of our galaxy for a while without falling into the event horizon and then somehow managing to escape back out would give us the experience of leaping “forward” in time when we return. Finally, having proven that even “ordinary people” can reach the conclusions of the great scientific minds of history, Hawking ends the show with the imperative “Think like a genius.”

But there is a fundamental flaw in Stephen Hawking’s logic (well, at least the logic of the show’s writers — Hawking himself is not actually credited as a writer). Unlike my poor solitary brain in that dark theater here in Seattle, each of the teams on the shows that aired this week benefited from two of the evolutionary advantages that have enabled our species to walk, row, sail, and ultimately fly out of the confines of our ancestral homelands.

What the show fails to highlight, focused as it is on physics and cosmology rather than paleoanthropology or evolutionary biology, is that the participants are benefiting from distributed cognition and altruism — attributes innate to how the human mind works. By operating as a cooperative team, with access to the information and technology humans have built up over the past 200,000 years, they are able to arrive at the same innovative breakthroughs that individual geniuses have over the last 400 years of unbounded scientific discovery. Each team of “ordinary people” is also a diverse group, and they complement each other as they explore concepts in relativity, cosmic scale, and the probability of the existence of intelligent life beyond our solar system.

But even those singular geniuses of the past have acknowledged their debt to the work of previous thinkers. Isaac Newton famously said in 1676, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Today, Hawking stands on Einstein’s shoulders, who stood on Newton’s shoulders, who stood on Copernicus’s shoulders. It’s geniuses all the way down!

Through education and technology, each of us benefits from the giants whose shoulders we stand on. This is no less true with my college degree and iPhone today than it was 43,000 years ago when our ancestors taught their children how to carve musical instruments from animal bones. Because we all benefit from the accumulated culture of our species, we are indeed able to be geniuses.

So Stephen Hawking tells us, “Think like a genius.”

Due to the ambiguity of plurality in the second person in English grammar, Hawking leaves it open to us to interpret whether he is speaking to each of us individually, or all of us collectively. I prefer to believe that he means the latter. We are all stronger, better, and ultimately smarter together. Human intelligence exists not merely at an individual level, but as a result of the tools, artifacts, information, and meaning that we carry with us from one generation to the next.

Yes, Professor Hawking, thanks to the brilliance of all those who’ve gone before, we will indeed think like one monumental, collective genius.

[1] What this means is that there are about 700 million people smarter than me in the world today. That’s a lot of people. I find the concept of individual genius essentially meaningless.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve immersed myself deeper and deeper in the Paleolithic, reading scores of books and journal articles. Why?

Ever since my first visit at about age four to the Historical Museum of Hokkaido, with its mammoth skeletons and Paleolithic dioramas, I’ve been fascinating by the archaeology of deep human history (as Clive Gamble puts it in the subtitle of his exceptional book Settling the Earth). I wandered by chance onto the Tategahana Paleolithic Site at Lake Nojiri in Nagano during an excavation, walked carrot fields in Yokohama looking for Jomon potsherds, and when I traveled to Jordan during college for an Iron Age dig, I spent my evenings surface-collecting Middle Paleolithic tools from a nearby barley field. The vast, mostly unknown and seemingly unrelatable world of the Stone Age seems so much more interesting than the thoroughly modern world of Archimedes, Hadrian, and Augustine of Hippo.

The people driving their cars around the Coliseum in the photo below are separated from the Romans who built it by a mere 1% of the time our species has walked this earth. The archaeology of the complex, stratified societies that emerged during and after the Neolithic frankly bores me.

I’ve always been that strange arty type just as entranced by science and technology — there is no dichotomy or conflict for me. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life melding my background in language and communication with a passion for data-driven research and the creation of new technologies. Despite being an English major during college back in the mid 90’s, my first “real” technology job was running the websites for several university departments, using vi on Sun Solaris to hand code the sites’ HTML — a skill carried over from repeatedly hitting F11 to Reveal Codes in WordPerfect on DOS.

When I finally took calculus alongside aspiring engineers and physicists, I had an epiphany: Mathematics and programming languages follow the same rules as music and human languages — a vocabulary with syntax and return values. Poetry is code. Music is math. And they’re not mere logic — they’re beautiful, emotionally rich expressions of this amazing, symbolic, social brain we’ve inherited from our ancestors.

When friends and colleagues wonder at my diverse interests — writing poetry, playing with LEGO, reading as much as I can about the Paleolithic, and running the planning and design teams for software development companies — I explain that there is a common thread throughout. I observe patterns and I make connections. I imagine and I explore. In doing so I create. I make stuff. I build things.

But I’m not special — to do all that merely defines me as a member of the human species. Understanding how we became us — and what “us” even means — is precisely what we can learn by studying human origins and the vast reaches of the Paleolithic. That is why I read.

The period of the Paleolithic that fascinates me most, as I know it does many archaeologists, is the transition between the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic. I’m particularly fascinated by archaeological work in parts of the world where anatomically modern humans (AMH) and Neanderthals met, potentially interacted, and certainly interbred. The two most likely areas where this happened, based on archaeogenetic and archaeological evidence, are the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe.

While the genetics are at this point incontrovertible — all non-African modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA, and recent research has proved that gene flow also occurred in the other direction — what intrigues me most are the cultural markers of interaction between AMH and Neanderthals. Similarly, what constitutes behavioral rather than merely anatomical modernity? Thus, the Mode 3 technologies associated with AMH at several sites in the Levant and Mode 4 technologies (and potentially symbolic behavior such as personal adornment) associated with Neanderthals at Châtelperronian sites like Saint-Cesaire and Les Cottés in France represent amazing opportunities to answer these questions.